... the people working on it are all respected members of the international tournament circle...

Would that international tournament circle be the same as the local tournament circle down here where it is routine for very serious major tournaments to give out major penalty points to players who judges (aka respected members of the tournament circle) "feel" are bringing a list designed with the intention of winning the tournament.

I don't see members of a circle like that producing anything much better than or even really different to the official train wreck._________________Phonelobster's Self Proclaimed Greatest Hits Collection : (no really, they are awesome)

customers made a clearly superior game than gw did. it's a shame really...

The goal of GW is to sell miniatures. It sell better if there are some rules attached, but what they don't need is good rules. The strategy of GW has always been to sell high-quality miniatures and cheap rules.

So no, I don't think it's a shame. Actually, i think they should have out-sourced the rules a long time ago.

I think its clear to anyone who ever played 8th edition that 9th age is more thought out, more coherent ruleset then anything GW ever put out.

Will it hold? 9th age made big gains so far, but they need to keep new blood coming in. I think the big opportunity will be the new Warhammer Total War game, where new people will be looking at a ranked fantasy miniatures game and AoS is not it.

customers made a clearly superior game than gw did. it's a shame really...

The goal of GW is to sell miniatures. It sell better if there are some rules attached, but what they don't need is good rules. The strategy of GW has always been to sell high-quality miniatures and cheap rules.

So no, I don't think it's a shame. Actually, i think they should have out-sourced the rules a long time ago.

if you don't see a connection between aos having the worst rules of any tabletopgame ever and the fact that noone is buying their new minis then i cannot help you.

maybe they should have outsourced rules, maybe they should have just hired/retained competent people. but they didn't, so that's kind of beside the point. the new rules are shit, and the corresponding mini-sales are shit. their fantasy player base is gone, most of them will most likely never return. everything about warhammer that gw has done recently has been a disaster. i call that a shame.

there was a time when gw made great games, like space hulk or bloodbowl. that time is long gone. i call that a shame as well.

Ghremdal wrote:

I think its clear to anyone who ever played 8th edition that 9th age is more thought out, more coherent ruleset then anything GW ever put out.

Will it hold? 9th age made big gains so far, but they need to keep new blood coming in. I think the big opportunity will be the new Warhammer Total War game, where new people will be looking at a ranked fantasy miniatures game and AoS is not it.

i think that will be point where gw's legal department will act.

it would greatly appreciated if someone with legal knowledge could comment on 9th age practically being a heavily houseruled version of warhammer 8th edition with all the names changed. does gw have any means to shut that down? the 9th age people seem confident they are safe.

it would greatly appreciated if someone with legal knowledge could comment on 9th age practically being a heavily houseruled version of warhammer 8th edition with all the names changed. does gw have any means to shut that down? the 9th age people seem confident they are safe.

IT seems they have a legal team with someone who specializes in international law/copyright and they claim they are not doing any kind of copyright infringement. IF you look at Mantic and their armies that seems to hold up.

Basically the legal arguments are thus:
1) game mechanics cannot be copyrighted
2) 9th age uses no copyrighted terms
3) 9th age is not for profit company/venture
4) GW abandoned selling rules / Warhammer fantasy anyway
5) GW lost a big legal battle recently for something more substantial then 9th age is doing
6) there is little profit to be made and a big loss if GW tries legal channels (for GW that is)

You can't own rules. You can't own generic terms. That's why TSR couldn't stop people from making games where you rolled 3d6 to determine your Strength score. They fucking tried, but it turns out you can't own rolling 3d6 and adding them together, nor can you own characters having a Strength attribute.

Games Workshop went to court about some people who were making models and selling them as units usable in GW armies for unit types that GW never bothered making sculpts for. And while they won a couple of corner cases, on the really big issues they lost badly. It turns out that Games Workshop doesn't really own most of the concepts they use. That's why they rebooted their world with things having stupid names. They can't own "Lizard Men" but they can own the "Seraphon."

40k got similar treatment. They can't own the words "Imperial Guard," so they renamed the faction "Astra Militarum" and so on and so forth. They can't own common English words, but they can own bad translations into Hebrew and Latin. The errors make it unique, and therefore subject to copyright. The correct Hebrew plural of Seraph is Seraphim, so making it Seraphon in your works makes it a unique term of art. Similarly with how Latin adjectives have to agree with their nouns in number and sex and shit, so if you wanted to say "Stars Military" it would be "Astra Militarae." Getting the gender wrong makes it copyrightable, because it's no longer simply a normal word.

The basic reality is that no one gives a shit about Games Workshop's actual Intellectual Property. And even more importantly, no one even considers giving a shit about Games Workshop's new IP scrubbed IP. They've taken their ball and gone home, and there's basically no reason at all for anyone to chase after them to join their No Homer's Club.

I am not saying they are taking the world by storm, but they are certainly in a good place now where they can expand.

Who'll do the expanding? It's something created by fans and given away for free. Chances are that they'll sooner or later just burn out, or splinter up.

Pathfinder started a business that sold stuff. Pathfinder devs could make a living out of it that pays bills and shit, giving them an incentive to constantly expand. If 9th age doesn't make money from somewhere, it will probaly fade out by attrition._________________

FrankTrollman wrote:

Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.

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I am not saying they are taking the world by storm, but they are certainly in a good place now where they can expand.

Who'll do the expanding? It's something created by fans and given away for free. Chances are that they'll sooner or later just burn out, or splinter up.

Pathfinder started a business that sold stuff. Pathfinder devs could make a living out of it that pays bills and shit, giving them an incentive to constantly expand. If 9th age doesn't make money from somewhere, it will probaly fade out by attrition.

Being official and supported by a company made Encyclopedia Brittanica the go to source of information of this era. Upstarts like Wikipedia will burn out sooner or later or splinter off....

Indeed, google the company that makes billions is the go to source information of this era, while there are hundreds/thousands of wikis out there, none of which are particularly trusty. Wikipedia most often than not only offers shallow trivia, while google can find the most obscure details you care to ask for.

And heck, even wikipedia asks for your money donations every few months._________________

FrankTrollman wrote:

Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.

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customers made a clearly superior game than gw did. it's a shame really...

The goal of GW is to sell miniatures. It sell better if there are some rules attached, but what they don't need is good rules. The strategy of GW has always been to sell high-quality miniatures and cheap rules.

So no, I don't think it's a shame. Actually, i think they should have out-sourced the rules a long time ago.

if you don't see a connection between aos having the worst rules of any tabletopgame ever and the fact that noone is buying their new minis then i cannot help you.

Even when they were selling well, the rules were basically a mess of exploits. The most efficient armies were the most degenerate ones, the most powerful units were the last published, the game made you roll several hundred of dice but only a few rolls really matter, etc. Every game in the concurrence had better rules but less cool minis, and didn't sell as much. So no, I cannot see a clear connection between "having the worst rules" and "not selling well", since they always had the worst rules even when they were selling well.

AoS wiped out the previous setting, so the lore behind your "years to build up army with commander who has his own backstory" is now void. The new models also follow a different aesthetic that focuses around space marines.

I'd say its a combination of lore and rules changes making old players feel their old armies were abandoned, and the new models not appealing to them.

So I got a chance to look at the Age of Sigmar models down at the local gaming hole in the wall. And all I can say is wow. These are terrible. They look like this:

Click here to see the hidden message (It might contain spoilers)

And they want about $50 for a box of five. These guys cost ten dollars a model and they look like something from the Steel movie with Shaquille O'Neal. They are so fucking goofy looking that I was at first unsure that I wasn't looking at melty scrap or some sort of unfinished greenstuff mods.

-Frank

I fully agree with Frank that the sigmarines minis are pretty awful.

Exalted/Vampire and 90% of recent computer games show that you can have godawful rules and people will still buy your stuff if it looks shiny and cool. But GW newest models are not that._________________

FrankTrollman wrote:

Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.

From what I've heard AoS has been updated with points costs and army lists, and GW reports selling more models than they did in previous years and have a steady stream of releases like fire dorfs and blue birds and tree elves who are trees and elves at once.

There also seems to be a growing tournament scene, but 'seems' the comments sections of Bell of Lost Souls and other Warhammer rumor/discussion sites now have more AoS supporters than detractors.

Well, the 'selling more models' may well have little to do with AoS. One of the weirder business practices GW has stumbled upon is announcing they're killing products off, which triggers a rush to buy them up off their website before they're gone. They also discovered they can bring back things they've discontinued, for a 'limited time' and artificially create those rushes. And since they can just pop moulds into their spinners, they can create stock and do this multiple times.

'Last Chance to Buy' and 'limited edition' no longer have the same meaning on the GW website that they do other places. Rather than push sales with book releases, they've discovered what really pushes sales is fear.

That the Warhammer Total War computer game was a smash hit (and probably a bigger contributor to the sale of models than the actual tabletop rulebook) by specifically ignoring the AoS bullshit should demonstrate how the old fluff was better than AoS. GW was just really stupid at not using it properly.

That the Warhammer Total War computer game was a smash hit (and probably a bigger contributor to the sale of models than the actual tabletop rulebook) by specifically ignoring the AoS bullshit should demonstrate how the old fluff was better than AoS. GW was just really stupid at not using it properly.

I'm honestly convinced that had they done the AoS rules with a few tweaks (and... points, because honestly, the fuck?) and kept the old setting, it would have done fine. But instead Sigmarines warred for a year over infinite planes with no people, places or thing to care about except the gates to the next infinite plane over. There is nothing to lose or gain, just infinitely replaceable goons killing infinitely replaceable goons with spikes and no shirts.

It's the Blood War with extra factions, and now dwarves are naked greek wrestlers for no reason and lizardmen are exactly the same but with a new name because.... uh... old ranges are bad and that's why all tomb kings models had to be smashed except that time some were brought back to sell for a month in Truly Actually Last Chance This Time, Honest (until GW brings them back again like they're the 5th 'limited edition' re-release of Space Hulk), because they needed to inflate 'AoS fantasy sales' during a slump.

But hey, these other undead models are completely ok to keep selling as is. Isn't all this new and different stuff for the Whole New Setting utterly exciting? Including these exactly-the-same Skaven? Totally reboxed those, and wow, does that make all the difference. And oh look, remember the starter set for last edition? You can totally buy those again because Aelfs are entirely different from Elfs. Also, have some more shirtless chaos models. They're Tzeentch flavored, so they have pointy masks rather than horned helmets.

And yes, the Regimental Standard is GW poking fun at their own shit. Usually too on the nose to actually be funny, and the narrative voice is too far off to give it the subtly satirical air it actually needs.

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I'm honestly convinced that had they done the AoS rules with a few tweaks (and... points, because honestly, the fuck?) and kept the old setting, it would have done fine. But instead Sigmarines warred for a year over infinite planes with no people, places or thing to care about except the gates to the next infinite plane over. There is nothing to lose or gain, just infinitely replaceable goons killing infinitely replaceable goons with spikes and no shirts.

Reducing Warhammer Fantasy down to a skirmish-level game with the freedom to mix and match armies was certainly not a bad idea. Mordheim (the computer game) is not a very well implemented game from a ruleset perspective but it's being played because there is a love for mis-mashing together your own band of rogues.

The problem is exactly as you said - they blew up the whole fucking universe for the sake of adding Space Marines. Worse nobody even likes the damn Sigmarines. The Total Warhammer game doesn't have them. The local store doesn't even carry them.

Had they instead re-focused Warhammer Fantasy into a specific area - say a No Man's Land created by the last big Chaos invasion where various small forces operate independently - then they could have gotten away with the change in rule set without alienating the old base. And then maybe they could have slipped in the Space Marines to see if they sold well or not.

But no, as with all GW "business strategy" their fallback to any slump in sales is "SPACE MARINES". That's why we're getting all the shit Space Marine video games and shit Space Marine Black Library novels.

Yet until the Horus Heresy their bestselling novel series was on the Imperial Guard (Gaunt's Ghosts); and even the Horus Heresy largely depicted Marines as being so mortal and fallible that they may as well be Guardsmen. Meanwhile the best-selling video game series on 40K is Dawn of War, which was all about adding the different races and peaked around the time they added the Tau into the line-up. Heck, the Battlefleet Gothic video game on its own sold over 200,000 copies and has probably earned more than the Sigmarines models.

In short, they literally don't understand that while the Space Marines may be their biggest seller on the 40K tabletop (and I would argue it's because of cost reasons rather than people really liking Marines that much), it's actually one of their weaker IPs everywhere else. Indeed, you could throw the Marines out of many of their best-remembered games and replace them with Guardsmen or some other faction (e.g. Space Hulk) and it would be pretty much the same or even better game.

Certainly there would be fewer jokes about how the supposedly best military force in the Galaxy decided that they should deploy huge lumbering Terminator-armored troops in one of the tightest battlefields imaginable despite the said armor being easily sliced to pieces like wet tissue paper by the Genestealers opposing them.

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I don't think you can separate GW's perplexing world building decisions from their recent court case defeat where they were ruled incapable of owning regular words like 'Space Marines' and 'Imperial Guard.' Everything they've done since then has been a move to uniqify the IP so that they can own it. Can't call things Orcs or Dwarves, you have to call them made up words that GW can own. All the factions have been renaimed gibberish or mis-spelled Latin or Hebrew. That isn't a mistake. If it wasn't misspelled, GW couldn't own it.

As to whether it's selling more models or not, or which lines are or are not selling well, I can't say. GW doesn't release actual figures and routinely lies to the public to make whatever the latest thing sound like the hottest thing. Everything is always selling like hotcakes until they aren't selling it anymore and then it never did very well. GW claims about how they and their lines are doing are only consistently bullshit.

Certainly anecdotally it appears that no one is buying AoS in any of the places I go. And that's in fucking England where it's hard to get non-GW stuff at all. I literally see more people playing Bloodbowl than Fantasy Battle these days.

As to whether it's selling more models or not, or which lines are or are not selling well, I can't say. GW doesn't release actual figures and routinely lies to the public to make whatever the latest thing sound like the hottest thing. Everything is always selling like hotcakes until they aren't selling it anymore and then it never did very well. GW claims about how they and their lines are doing are only consistently bullshit.

Actually, in their 2016 results they admitted that they only achieved higher than expected profitability due to an increase in licensing income, meaning it was the sale of games like Total Warhammer and Battlefleet Gothic Armada that pulled them out of the fire this year despite these being based on IPs that GW itself has basically abandoned on the tabletop.

And while the re-naming issue is well-known there was pretty much absolutely no reason from a world-building perspective to publish "The Beast" series for Black Library - which is a big deal since the novels were actually their second biggest moneymaker after 40K models. "The Beast" didn't do any renaming - but it did try to create another long series like the Horus Heresy.

The problem was twofold. First, nobody cared about the storyline of "The Beast" because it was creating brand-new but irrelevant lore (set between 30K and 40K), unlike the Horus Heresy where there was a pre-existing fandom. Second, GW seems to have failed to notice that people are beginning to drop the Horus Heresy because it's dragging things out to a ridiculous degree - to the point that even its own authors are beginning to get tired and give up on it.

Seriously, they don't seem to have noticed that in-universe they are only on the second year of a seven year war, and yet they've already spent 10 real years and written 41 novels on the subject. At this rate the Siege of Terra is going to begin around novel 100, which should start selling around the time most of the fandom has reached retirement age.

Meanwhile, their most profitable pre-Heresy series hasn't had a new book for the last six years, possibly because the book that was supposed to come out in 2014/15 got delayed due to needing to re-edit Imperial Guard to Astra Miliwhatever and the author finally getting fed up and deciding that Marvel paid more for fewer words with Guardians of the Galaxy comics anyway.

Last edited by Zinegata on Fri Jan 20, 2017 8:31 am; edited 1 time in total

I don't think you can separate GW's perplexing world building decisions from their recent court case defeat where they were ruled incapable of owning regular words like 'Space Marines' and 'Imperial Guard.' Everything they've done since then has been a move to uniqify the IP so that they can own it. Can't call things Orcs or Dwarves, you have to call them made up words that GW can own. All the factions have been renaimed gibberish or mis-spelled Latin or Hebrew. That isn't a mistake. If it wasn't misspelled, GW couldn't own it.
-Frank

Except, from a sales/IP perspective, that doesn't work. Anyone wanting to do knock offs can still make generic orcs or dwarves and call them that and say they're for use in many popular fantasy games. And if people want a cheaper (and not increasingly crazy looking) alternative, they can just go buy that and GW has no recourse, because no on is infringing (or cares to infringe) on Orruks, which are obviously still just Orc knock-offs themselves.

And it still doesn't explain the re-released old armies (like skaven or Vampire counts undead or lizardmen) that aren't redesigned at all. Or renamed with the first two.

But yes, I'm not surprised it does poorly (especially compared to blood bowl). No one gives a shit if chaos takes over or loses 1% of infinite space with no people or places. They did care if Middenheim and Boris Todbringer were threatened in the old storm of chaos campaign (and why many lost their shit when it was retconned), because people like settings, specific characters and places.

Fantasy lost its big draw when everything blew up and sigmar flew away on the planet core to make new infinite planes. The problem was the rules and especially the imbalance between army books. Exploding the setting that wasn't in the problem set was a huge wtf? moment.